Windows 2003 guest best practices

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Introduction

This is a set of best practices to follow when installing a Windows 2003 guest on a Proxmox VE server. Right now it's a work in progress, written by a Proxmox noob but hopefully soon it will be a comprehensive and reliable document. Please feel free to add to it, even if just to pose a potential best practice.

Power settings

In order for the Windows 2003 guest to shutdown cleanly in the event of a shutdown on the Proxmox VE host you need to enable "Allow system to be shut down without having to log on". It can be found in the policy editor here: "Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options\Shutdown: Allow system to be shut down without having to log on", by running: gpedit.msc.

Disk

raw vs qcow2

Raw file format provides better performance while qcow2 offers advanced features such as copy on write and snapshots.

virtio storage drivers

Use virtio dirvers for best performance.

caching

Under disk properties in Windows 2003 you can turn off the disk cache (Windows caches writes in ram). KVM enables it's own writethough caching which relies on the Debian hosts caching (I think). Plus modern disks have a sizable hardware cache. Do we really need all this chained redundant caching?

Network

Use e1000 NIC. It's stable and performs well.

Sources and further reading

www.linux-kvm.org/page/Tuning_KVM